Some days, I feel like I have everything figured out. I know what I want to do, where I want to go, what to say, how to say it--ultimately, I feel like I know how to function.
Other days, I feel like I'm only repeatedly falling on my face. Over and over again. Unsure what to do, where to go, what to say, how to say it. I don't know how to function. So usually, I don't. I go into shut-down mode and wallow in my own negative thoughts.
It's unhealthy, but it happens. Despite all that I've been through, despite the fact that I feel like I'm finally at a place in life where I can be happy, it happens. I still have bouts of what I feel is despression, where I'm ready to give up and give in, as I think I worded it in another blog entry, which for me is a scary thought.
Because of this, as well as other aspects of my life and myself, I feel like I'm an incredibly unbalanced individual. Either I'm happy or I'm depressed. Either I'm sure or I'm not. There's no happy medium (no pun intended) where I'm happy, but allowed to have a bad day. Or a bad day after which I know calmness will follow. I'm honestly afraid to slip back into depressive states because I know what my thoughts were. I know where those thoughts led, and I know where I almost ended up. It's not a nice place, so I try to avoid it at all costs. I don't seem to try and avoid it in a healthy way, in which I deal with the issues and move past them, at least not for the most part. Instead I seem to suppress and bottle up all that makes me upset, which is something that I've done for as long as I can remember. I don't want to deal with it because it hurts, and now too because I'm supposed to be happy. I'm supposed to be happy, so how in the world can I experience any sort of sadness?
Logically, I know that people experience both, and that it's perfectly okay. It's not a bad thing to be upset, it's just something you have to work through.
Irrationally, I just can't get a grip on this idea and apply it to myself. At the risk of tooting my own horn, as it were, I feel like I can give some pretty sound advice to people who are struggling through things emotionally (although recent conversations have caused me to even question this...). Pretty much, looking from the outside in, I feel like I can give my input on what I think would be helpful to that individual. But when it comes to myself, I can't apply any of that. I can't get the logic to make sense to my own irrational mind, so instead of trying to fix stuff, I just end up running in circles.
And repeatedly falling on my face.
Lately, I feel especially like I'm just falling on my face. I'm approaching the end of my university career as an English student and I have to make decisions about where to go from there. As much as I value living in the moment, we live in a society where the future is constantly pressing upon us. Because of this, I have a crazy amount of stress and anxiety that I'm trying to ignore as I go from day-to-day, but it's slowly building. Recently, a close friend of mine made a comment (whether it was serious or flippant, I can't tell) and it upset me more than I expected it to. Normally, I don't know that it would have. I feel like normally I would have said something like, "Well, I'm sorry you feel that way" and gone on with my day. But this comment has been weighing on me, and I don't even know what to do about it. I went into serious shut-down mode, where I just didn't want to deal with anything or really anyone, and every moment felt long, drawn out and agonizingly like it would never end. I've restarted to an extent, but I still don't know what I should do about what was said.
I think what I'm trying to get at here is that even though I said in my entry "My version of happiness" that I got to a point where I decided that I deserved to be happy and that it was okay to be happy, this is all clearly still a process. Although I guess I sort of felt like I hit that magical moment where I knew everything would be okay, sometimes everything is not okay, and that maybe that magical moment doesn't even exist. Not to devalue reaching that point where my mindset began to change, but I think I overestimated it in the long run. Even though I don't think things can change in a moment, I think I clung to that moment as if it were a magical moment when everything changed because in some way I needed it. I needed something new to hang onto instead of the sadness and misery that I was before.
I think instead I have to think of that moment as more of a starting point. A foundation upon which to build myself instead of the only thing holding everything together.
Maybe then that will lead to a better sense of balance and less falling on my face.
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